Half the public say public and social services, over police, prevent crime

Keeping Us Safe: Rethinking policing, harm and justice, is a major new report calling for a fundamental shift in how the UK approaches safety, harm prevention and justice.

Drawing on nationally representative polling of 5,405 people in England and Wales, alongside in-depth community-based qualitative research, the report finds strong public support for social investment over punitive enforcement when given nuanced choices.

Key findings from the national polling include:

• More than half (52%) think investing in public and social services would do more to prevent crime than increasing police powers (18% disagree, the rest are unsure).
• Half (50%) of the public believe investing in public and social services would do more to prevent crime than increasing the number of police officers (22% disagree, the rest are unsure).

Keeping Us Safe critiques the dominant political and media framing that more police and more policing powers are common-sense solutions to social issues. It argues that binary polling questions obscure these nuances and reinforce a narrow public narrative that equates safety with police presence.

In the report, we trace modern British policing to its colonial origins, finding that contemporary policing continues to reproduce racial injustices through stop and search, punitive practices in educational settings, policing the border, mental health detentions and the overrepresentation of Black and racialised communities in the criminal legal system.

We argue that despite decades of inquiries and reform efforts, including high-profile reviews into institutional racism - from the 1999 Macpherson Report which found ‘institutional racism’ in the Metropolitan Police, to the 2023 Casey Review which identified a culture of racism, misogyny, and homophobia - attempts to reform policing have failed to address systemic issues. Instead, it argues, reform has often individualised racism as a matter of ‘bad apples’, leaving structures which produce inequality intact.

Police spending reached £19.9 billion last year, while youth services, mental health provision, housing support and community infrastructure face chronic underfunding. 

Across six key areas (‘serious youth violence’, education, housing and homelessness, border enforcement, gender-based violence and mental health), the research finds that policing often deepens harm and fails to address root causes such as poverty, social exclusion, trauma and racism. It highlights community-led models already in practice, including:

• transformative justice practices that address harm without reproducing violence, grounded in care, consent and collective accountability;
• reparative justice approaches that acknowledge and seek redress for historic and ongoing harms caused by racism, colonialism and slavery and the inequalities they produced;
• restorative justice initiatives that empower survivors and create genuine opportunities for people who’ve caused harm to take responsibility and repair relationships;
• healing justice models that recognise harm as both systemic and interpersonal and treat healing as part of a collective political project.

The report sets out a series of ‘non-reformist reforms’ designed to build safer, more resilient communities. These include investing in teachers and pastoral support; ending school exclusions and the Prevent Duty; overhauling the Mental Health Act to end the use of police in responding to people in crisis; and an end to the No Recourse to Public Funds policy.

Keeping Us Safe concludes that safety does not begin with enforcement but with meeting people’s basic needs. It calls for a redistribution of public resources away from punitive systems and towards harm prevention, collective care and accountability.

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Dr Shabna Begum, CEO of the Runnymede Trust, said:

‘For too long, safety has been narrowly defined as more police, more powers and more punishment. 

“Our research shows that the picture is far more nuanced than political rhetoric suggests. When we asked people what actually prevents harm, they consistently chose social investment such as secure housing, youth services, mental health support over expanded policing. After listening to communities across the country, one message was clear: we cannot police our way out of poverty, inequality or trauma.

If we are serious about keeping people safe, we must invest in the social infrastructure that prevents harm in the first place. Community-led, trauma-informed and non-coercive approaches to justice are not utopian ideals, they already exist. The question is whether we have the political will to support and scale them. In the midst of colliding crises, this is a call to rethink and invest in what keeps us safe.”

Ilyas Nagdee, Amnesty International UK’s Racial Justice Lead, said:

“From schools to public services - including the reach of Prevent across communities - there's an urgent need for policymakers to consider rights-based alternatives to punishment.

"Despite repeated reviews highlighting racial inequalities in policing, little has changed. Stronger, fairer communities benefit everyone. The polling shows the British public is more open to a different approach than many expected. It's time for policymakers to move away from simply expanding police powers, prison sentences, and surveillance-based programmes, and instead invest in communities to prevent harm in the first place.”

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Acknowledgements

This report is the result of time, energy, knowledge and care shared by many people across the UK who are engaged in the everyday work of building safer, stronger, more connected communities. We are especially grateful to the individuals and organisations who gave their time so generously to help shape, inform and guide this research.

Thank you to the community members who took part in our workshops in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, London and Manchester. Their openness, thoughtful reflection and willingness to engage in difficult conversations with care and honesty made this work possible.

We are also grateful to our partners – 4Front, Bawso, Black South West Network, Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights, Imkaan, the No Police in Schools campaign, Poetic Unity, See Me and Mwanzo Project – who co-created this work, ensuring that it remained grounded in the experiences of those most affected by over-policing, systemic racism and state neglect.

Finally, thank you to colleagues at Kids of Colour, Refugee Action, Release and the Traveller Movement for sharing your expertise through in-depth interviews. Your contributions provided critical context and helped to strengthen the evidence base underpinning this work.

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This report represents the views of the Runnymede Trust and not necessarily the positions of our partner organisations or individual contributors.